Manual Testing Blog

By Maria Martin, Marketing Communications Specialist
I would like to offer CONGRATULATIONS to our winner of the Pit Stop Challenge game on www.manualtesting.com.
The fastest time, or should I say, the fastest legitimate time since we know that there were a couple of testers who tried to break our game went to Troy Davis from Trizetto Group, USA with 27.09 seconds on the clock! A fantastic Nintendo Wii is on it’s way to Troy, well done! If you would like to have another go at playing to win on our site, keep us bookmarked, since a new game will be coming soon…

By Stuart Bishop, Head of Development

 On the 21^st September 2008 I am running in my first half marathon. I have never run more than 6 miles before, so it is going to be a challenge! At the same time, I would like to raise some money for Adoption UK who provide and support a national self-help network for adoptive parents, prospective adopters and everyone involved in adoption. Please do not feel obliged, but do take a look at the link below, sponsoring really couldn’t be any easier. Many thanks Stuart Bishop http://www.justgiving.com/stubishop

There was a great story on the BBC today - Management speak - don’t you just hate it?

Check it out for a good giggle – news.bbc.co.uk

There does seem to have been ‘a paradigm shift’ towards corporate managers who use this type of language as a substitute for original thought. If you want to climb up on the ‘strategic staircase’ you do seem to need to be ‘a platform atheist’ and ‘product evangelist’ whilst maintaining ‘A high altitude view’ and ‘a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach’ with ‘360-degree thinking’….

One of my favourites is number 39. “In my work environment it’s all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don’t seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we’re being wee’d on. Which we usually are.” LMD, London

How about In Testing? – What sector-specific delights do we get blessed with on a daily basis? I’d love to hear from anyone who has any gems to share. To stick with the theme, I suppose that should be, ’my door is open on this issue’.
Please share.

Here at Original Software we have decided to impose a corporate tax on the use of any of these maddening phrases. Any employees caught in violation will be made to cough up to the charity box, collecting for Macmillan Cancer Relief (a worthy cause AND a valued client). Any customers out there who have contact with the guys from our sales team, please try and trip them up on this – they are too loaded anyway!

In this weeks article, published by QAGuild.com, Martin Adcock, Managing Director of Experimentus, gives us ten top cost saving tips in dealing with tight IT budgets.
  
“With the credit crunch affecting IT budgets, Experimentus, the leading UK software quality management solutions consultancy, highlights ten ways to reduce software development lifecycle costs within IT departments.

1. Focus on well documented Functional RequirementsWithout well documented Functional Requirements, there is potential for a system to be delivered which does not meet the customer’s expectations. For example, perhaps it does not work as they believe it should – even though the development team believe that they have worked in line with the requirements as documented. This can lead to development rework, which is likely to delay the release, increase costs, and create discord between the customer and the software team.

Visit www.qaguild.com/weekly_article.php to read more..!

CIO prayers are answered with the first manual testing solution to support the IBM Mainframe

by Kate Mackinder, Media Relations Officer

We’ve just launched a new upgrade for TestDrive-Assist - see press release below.

May 7, 2008 – Original Software, the automated software testing vendor, today announced the availability of an upgrade for its popular manual testing solution, TestDrive-Assist. Due to increasing pressure on CIOs to reduce risk on mission-critical applications, Original Software has experienced considerable demand to extend its support to the IBM mainframe.   TestDrive-Assist is designed to help business analysts, QA teams and user-acceptance testers in detecting and reproducing errors, sharing knowledge, and producing audit-quality diagnostics and reporting. With less than a ten minute learning curve, users are up-and-running instantly and workload can be reduced by over a third.     “Since its initial launch TestDrive-Assist has supported modern web and client server interfaces but we have been surprised at the level of demand for also testing legacy mainframe applications. Whilst the rate of development on legacy applications has dropped in favour of web interfaces, many of the worlds most critical applications are still based on legacy systems and any changes which cannot be properly tested represent an unacceptable level of risk to today’s CIO.” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software.  The latest version of TestDrive-Assist extends its support to cover 3270 applications, the emulation used on IBM mainframes, otherwise known as the zSeries.  A single solution can now be used for assisting with manual testing of Windows and Web applications as well as legacy iSeries and Mainframe green screens. There is full support for the mainframe including screen and input capture, performance statistics, spell-checking, test status audit tracking, test plan import, results storage and reporting.   Original Software will be exhibiting at Star East in Orlando this week, on booth 51, where they will be promoting the latest version of Test Drive-Assist and the launch of ManualTesting.com, a community site with a wealth of free downloadable resources designed to aid users involved with manual testing.  Existing TestDrive-Assist customers on a current maintenance contract will receive this upgrade free-of-charge. It can be downloaded from Original Software’s customer site. Trials of the mainframe enabled product can be requested from solutions@origsoft.com.   

By Maria Martin, Marketing Communications Specialist
Wow. Busy, busy, show. There was a constant stream of people visiting our stand. We were completely wiped out of all our TestDrive-Assist demo CDs by lunchtime and our literature stands were stripped bare. We’d like to extend our thanks to the organisers for a great show and to all the people who took the time to visit our stand on the day. To celebrate the launch of manualtesting.com and in line with our TestDrive-Assist strap-line ‘push your manual testing into overdrive’, we had a Scalextric racing track on our stand. It proved a great success (except for the ladies on the next stand along, who were constantly threatened by cars flying off the track!) and I can announce that the prize the fastest lap of the day went to Stuart Blackwell at Resolution with 1.38 seconds. Congratulations Stuart on such superb driving skills! A brand new Scalextric set will be winging its way to you as I write this. Continuing on that racing theme our pit stop challenge game has now gone live www.manualtesting.com/play_GAME.htm - It is addictive – be warned!!

By Sara Ponsford, Product Manager, Original Software
I read an interesting blog today, likening testing to a game of battleships (read the post here). Paul Homer raises an interesting point. Are too many products getting released with a significantly large number of problems, ultimately because developers hate testing? Is it the guys with no resources that are anxious about not wasting what little effort they have, that are getting the most bang for their buck? Answers on a postcard….

By Colin Armitage, CEO, Original Software
Since the first automation tools appeared on the horizon over 20 years ago, software test automation has been heralded as one of the saviours of IT and IS development teams the world over. During that period, many millions of dollars have been spent on software test automation - indeed, according to IDC, spend on software automation is over $1,000,000,000, and is destined to keep on growing.

At the same time, research carried out by Original Software consistently indicated that a maximum of 20% of the total amount of testing is carried out by QA and testing departments using automation tools. Indeed, many development teams carry out zero automation of their testing - choosing instead to run a completely manual process.

QA departments around the world continue to rely on manual processes for 80% of their software testing. Indeed in many places no automation is carried out at all.

Why is this? Testing is almost always perceived as the main bottleneck in any application delivery timeline, and it is universally agreed that manual testing can be time consuming, laborious, repetitive, and costly.

With all this negativity seemingly aimed at manual testing, why is it still the mainstay of application development quality assurance?